Between Two Fires: the lost play by Sylvia Pankhurst at The London Library

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The London Library is delighted to bring back Between Two Fires, the lost play by Sylvia Pankhurst, exclusively to The London Library Reading Room from Thursday 9 – Sunday 12 May 2024 for its second ever showing – now with newly discovered material and an accompanying programme of talks.

First performed last year to a sold-out audience at The London Library Lit Fest, the play will return for a limited run and its second performance in history in the Library’s famous Reading Room. For the new material, this will be the first time the words will be spoken aloud to an audience.

Imprisoned for sedition in the infamous HMP Holloway in 1920/21, Sylvia Pankhurst wrote a play. In solitary confinement, with a contraband pencil on prison issue toilet paper, the legendary suffragette and socialist activist composed a dramatization of her experiences within the political movements that would go on to bring vital social and political change, from her own grassroots activism to the top-level political conflict being played out by her beloved Keir Hardie – Labour's founding leader. Nearly a hundred years later, Pankhurst's biographer Rachel Holmes discovered the play via painstaking analysis of the delicate fragments jumbled into brown envelopes in the depths of an archive.

Directed by Roxana Silbert, produced by Amy Powell Yeates, with a cast yet to be announced, this limited run of performances will be followed each evening by different discussions and talks inspired by and in response to the play. The talks programme includes Labour MP for Rhondda and parliamentary historian Chris Bryant, activist and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, Helen Pankhurst, and film director Sarah Gavron (Suffragette).

Open to all, The London Library has been a world-class centre of creativity and inspiration for readers, writers and thinkers for over 180 years. The Library has had a long and enduring association with the Pankhurst family. Sylvia’s father Richard and older sister Christabel were both prominent members, along with many other figures from the Suffragette and Suffragist movements.

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